A Month at the Préfecture, Fifteen Minutes With the Préfet

I have renewed a residence permit in three countries, and I keep the receipts in a folder labelled, in my husband’s handwriting, PROOF WE EXIST. So I read the next part as a horror story.

In the early 1980s a girl arrived at the École alsacienne in Paris from Tehran, with good French and a residence card valid for one year. Her year group was going to Florence in the spring. Groups were formed. Hers was given Botticelli’s Primavera, and spent weeks arguing about the three Graces.

A one-year card, it emerged, did not include Italy. She needed permission to leave France and, more to the point, permission to come back in. She did not mention this at school. She went to the préfecture after lessons and took a number.

You know this room even if you have never been in it. Plastic chairs. A ticket machine. A clerk who, each visit, required one more document. A translated birth certificate. A letter from the school. A different letter from the school. Spring advanced. The file did not.

With a week to go she told her form teacher, who told the headmaster. Georges Hacquard ran the école from 1953 to 1986, and on this occasion his method was the telephone. He rang the préfet.

Not the préfecture. The préfet.

She was sent, with her father, to an address she did not know: a stone staircase, a smiling secretary, leather armchairs, a carpet so thick that her father, who had crossed a border on foot the year before, stood very still in it. The préfet received them within minutes. A marvellous school, he said. A magnificent trip. A stamp was waiting downstairs.

There are two staircases into the French state, and she had spent a month on the one with the numbered tickets.

It took a quarter of an hour. On the pavement her father kept thanking the building. She went to Florence, stood in front of the Primavera, and decided which Grace was the clever one.

What she remembered afterwards was that the headmaster never made a speech about it. He did not summon her or explain. He picked up the phone because one of his pupils was about to miss Florence, and that was the end of the matter.

I have tried to learn from this. Last year, stuck on a school-registration form in Belgium that wanted a document no Belgian could name, I rang the school and asked, as casually as I could manage, whether the head happened to know anyone at the commune.

The secretary said she would pass on the message. I am now in the folder.